The Japanese Learnerhttp://thejapaneselearner.com
The podcast about learning Japanese.Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:00:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.9http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheJapaneseLearnerPodcastA podcast about learning Japanese, created by Japanese learners, for Japanese learners. We discuss study tips and tricks, books and other materials, Japanese courses, long-term memorization strategies, and other topics related to the study of Japanese and all things Japan.Enrico BianconoEnrico Biancoenricob@gmail.comenricob@gmail.com (Enrico Bianco)2008-2009The podcast about learning JapaneseJapan, Japanese, language, learning, studyThe Japanese LearnerThe Japanese Learnerhttp://thejapaneselearner.com/wp-content/uploads/album_art_small.pnghttp://thejapaneselearner.com
Seeing boxes and gibberish where you should be seeing Japanese?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/7ZxzhFBuN2A/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/uncategorized/2012/07/13/mojibake-japanese-text/#commentsFri, 13 Jul 2012 21:00:00 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=758Before I took a somewhat long, unannounced hiatus from writing for the blog (申し訳ございません), I wrote about how you can type Japanese into your computer. Now I’m going to get a lot more technical (I am a software engineer by day, after all) and explain how Japanese is represented in a computer. There’s a bit of history, a bit of technology, and a bit of sociolinguistics, all in this single concept of rendering Japanese text on a computer screen.

Before I get into Japanese text though, I’d like to talk about ASCII. To a computer, everything is bits: ones and zeroes. What you see, though, is a variety of types of files including text, sound, and video. So how does a computer know which is which? Largely by convention. For different kinds of files, a particular set of conventions exist for interpreting the bytes (groups of 8 bits) and converting that into something that humans can understand and interact with. That might be letters on a screen, or it might be sound sent to your computer speakers. ASCII is one such convention, first published in the 60’s and still surviving even to this day. It is also the most logical place to start understanding the history of multilingual text in computers.

ASCII defines 128 characters by different combinations of 1’s and 0’s in the first 7 bits of each byte. Basically, every number from 0 to 127 is mapped to a character or control code (these codes don’t get printed on screen but instruct the computer about the text in other ways). If you count it up, you can imagine that it is quite enough to represent all of the characters one would typically need to type in English. But since only 7 bits are used, that leaves an 8th bit completely open and with that single bit, another 128 characters and control codes can be represented. English doesn’t need it, but consider Japanese. 128 is only just enough to cover the syllabic alphabets and there are still thousands and thousands of kanji characters that also need to be represented.

Japanese approached this problem the way that many other languages did: cleverly using the 8th bit to greatly expand the number of characters that can be represented. This is sometimes referred to as Extended ASCII. But Enrico, you say, even if you added another 128 characters, that wouldn’t nearly be enough to represent all of the Japanese characters. You’re absolutely right. But here’s the clever part: by using the extra numbers made available by that 8th bit, one can create a standard that allows two bytes to represent a character instead of one!

One of the standards for extending ASCII to represent Japanese is Shift JIS. I won’t go into too much detail about how this works, but in short it is a set of rules that allow the first byte to sometimes signal that it is not, by itself, a character, and it must be combined with the next byte to determine what character to draw on the screen. As with all ASCII extensions, the basic ASCII characters are still included, which means that English text can also be represented perfectly fine. Shift JIS doesn’t actually use all of the numbers that are available in two bytes, which ranges from 0 to 65,535. And really, it doesn’t need to. Even just a fraction of that is enough to represent virtually all of written Japanese.

But here’s the problem: you need to inform the computer that the text you’re reading is using Shift JIS, as opposed to standard ASCII or any other of the myriad extensions of ASCII. If you tell the computer to use the wrong one of these standards, it misinterprets the bytes and you see gibberish. The Japanese have a word for this: 文字化け (もじばけ). Examining the kanji, “mojibake” literally means “corruption of characters.” There are programs that can examine bytes and take a really good guess as to how the bytes should be interpreted, but none of them are perfect. This puts a real hamper on multilingual computing, and the problem becomes simply impossible when you want to combine multiple languages in a single piece of text, because each language extends ASCII in a different way, and none of the standards includes any sort of signal as to when to stop using one and start using another.

That’s where Unicode comes in. The goal of Unicode is to create one standard for characters in all of the world’s written languages. There are a few things that Unicode does quite differently from ASCII. The first is that each character or glyph is assigned a code point. These code points may be encoded in different ways using up to 4 bytes. With 4 bytes, you can count from 0 to 4,294,967,295. That’s way more than I could possibly imagine anybody ever needing to represent all of the world’s written characters. The comparison I sometimes hear is that with four bytes, you could give a unique combination to every grain of sand on Earth and probably still have some left over.

But since English text only needs 1 of those 4 bytes, it’s very wasteful to represent every character using a full 4 bytes. So Unicode defines different encoding standards to instruct the computer as to how the code points are represented in bytes. UTF-8 is the most common of these. UTF-8 is most convenient for representing English text and is easily the most common Unicode encoding in the wild, since it actually walks and talks like ASCII if you don’t need characters outside of the basic ASCII set (very convenient for programmers who are used to ASCII and haven’t learned Unicode). But all of the characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (where most of the characters in Unicode are defined so far) can be represented in between 1 and 3 bytes using UTF-8, so the encoding is definitely not lacking multilingual support. The details of how UTF-8 represents all of these code points is complicated and I don’t fully understand it myself, but if you’re curious there are many books and web pages on the subject.

But not everybody is happy with Unicode. One of the most controversial parts of the standard is the Han Unification. This is the Unicode standard’s attempt to represent multiple languages that use the Chinese characters into one set of code points. The intention of this unification is to help all of the characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fit happily into the Basic Multilingual Plane. It is an amusing coincidence that the Japanese are one of the biggest opponents of the Han Unification. Some Japanese scholars are of the opinion that historically and culturally significant variants of kanji are culled out by trying to combine all variants into a single code point. It also causes oddities like the Chinese variants of kanji characters appearing in Japanese text because the Unicode font being used to render the text has Chinese variants instead of Japanese.

So I hope this taught you everything you ever wanted to know and more about how Japanese text is represented in a computer.

If you have more questions, you can get in touch with Enrico by e-mail (enrico at thejapaneselearner.com) or you can leave a comment on Facebook and Google+.

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/uncategorized/2012/07/13/mojibake-japanese-text/feed/1http://thejapaneselearner.com/uncategorized/2012/07/13/mojibake-japanese-text/Tanabata Festival, Japan Foundation, Toronto – July 7, 2012http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/dGEW3KmKQUo/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/07/09/tanabata-festival-japan-foundation-toronto-july-7-2012/#respondMon, 09 Jul 2012 04:32:19 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=721In Japan, there is a summer festival that is celebrated by all Japanese nationalists every year on July 7th.

It’s called “Tanabata/七夕” which means “evening of the seventh.”

This “star festival” originated from the Chinese Qixi Festival and celebrates the yearly reunion between two deities that are deeply in love with each other and can only meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month.

The Japan Foundation in Toronto is holding festivities this week to celebrate.

As I walked into the facility, all the staff members were wearing “Yukata/浴衣,” which is a kimono that is made from a light cotton and is worn in the summer.

By the entrance stood a mini shrine for Tanabata and banners with the kanji character for “Matsuri/祭り/Festival.”

The staff had provided some paper and pens for visitors to write down their own wishes and desires in the hope that it will come true. Once, you were done writing down your wish, you were then instructed to tie the wish to a bamboo tree as it is tradition. (They had a bamboo tree in the lounge.)

I had read some wishes from past visitors to get a sense of what people were writing. For example, a child had asked for a dog as a pet, another child wanted to grow up big and strong, others had wished to be able to speak fluent English, I then decided to write a message of my own:

Then, there was a library “research” challenge. One had to find the answers to a sheet of questions by searching around the library. Prize winners will be contacted on August 7th to those that answered the most questions correctly. (Wish me luck! I’ll keep everyone posted if I win anything.)

For the rest of the week, they will have a “Yukata Dressing Up” demonstration followed by children being able to play with “PARO,” which is a “a therapeutic robot baby harp seal” that can interact with you when you speak to it or pet it!

It was so cute, I didn’t want to leave! I was petting him long enough that he “fell asleep” in my arms. I would love to get one of these if it didn’t cost $6,000 US!

They also had story-time for the children. The stories were all in Japanese, which was a nice way of sharpening my listening skills.

It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot more about the Japanese culture. Moreover, I got to see what it was like for Japanese people to celebrate this festival while they live or work in Toronto.

Maybe Japan is closer than I think. I hope to explore more “Japan” in my own city and will definitely share my findings with you all in the future.

I also hope that this will be an inspiration for others to go out and explore your own city and see how much “Japan” you can find.

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/07/09/tanabata-festival-japan-foundation-toronto-july-7-2012/feed/0http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/07/09/tanabata-festival-japan-foundation-toronto-july-7-2012/Writing in Japanese on Your Computerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/PKz1qstWqxs/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/06/22/writing-in-japanese-on-your-computer/#commentsFri, 22 Jun 2012 21:00:32 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=711Perhaps you’ve just started learning Japanese and you’ve gotten the hang of writing some katakana and hiragana by hand. Maybe you’ve brought a few kanji into the mix as well. But then you’re sitting at your computer and you’re thinking “huh, I know how to write it on paper but how do Japanese type on the computer?” Well, I’m going to answer that question.

First, I’m going to start with a “dirty” secret of Japanese input; you can do it with the keyboard you already have. I’m not going to go into specifics about how to turn on Japanese input and instead link to instructions for Windows and OS X. If those don’t help, some Google searches may get you the rest of the way. Give it a try and then come back and keep reading. =)

Okay, so I presume you’re all set now? Switch into Japanese input mode and type the words you want in romaji. You’ll notice that kana appear with an underline. Now press the spacebar. You’re presented with options on how to convert the kana you typed into the words you (hopefully) intended. In particular, if you type a word like 時間 (じかん) and hit space, you can convert it into the proper kanji characters. Pretty neat, huh? This is known as romaji input and it is actually the most common way to input Japanese on a computer, supported by virtually all full-size keyboards. Electronic dictionaries often use romaji input exclusively. Small versions of characters like あ, い, and つ can usually be produced by typing ‘xa’, ‘xi’ and ‘xtsu’ respectively.

Now, pictured here is the Japanese version of the official Apple wireless keyboard. This is the keyboard on my desk, actually. At a glance, you’ll notice many differences from the standard US keyboard layout. Some of the control keys (Control, Tab, Backspace/Delete, Enter/Return) are smaller and in different positions than on the US keyboard. Some of the punctuation has shuffled to different keys (for example, the double-quote is on the 2 key). Also, some keys have up to four characters marked on them. But there’s also an important similarity: the English letters are in the layout that you know and love — well, unless you’re into Dvorak. So, as long as you can deal with the punctuation being in slightly different places, you can use one of these exactly like a US keyboard (and I often do).

But if that’s the case, why would anybody use one of these confusing monstrosities?

That leads into the other type of text input that Japanese use: direct input, also known as kana input. The keyboard provides a couple of keys that allow you to switch input modes. This is considerably more convenient than switching modes in the Japanese input menu in OS X or Windows, even if you have already set up keyboard shortcuts for switching modes. At the press of a key, you can switch from かな to 英数 (Alphanumeric). When you’re in kana mode and you hit a key, you get the character displayed at the bottom. So hit the Z key while in かな mode and you get つ. If you hold shift and press a key, you get the character displayed on the right. This is commonly used for getting the small version of characters like あ, い, and つ. In 英数 mode, you get the character at the left when you press the key and the one at the top when you hold shift and press that key. Once you’ve gotten the hang of that (and it takes a while!), it’s apparently considerably faster than romaji input. In the same way as romaji input, you press space to convert the kana into kanji.

What about katakana, you ask? If you look at the keyboard carefully, there’s no katakana on it. Some Japanese keyboards provide a button specifically for katakana but in my case I’ve set up my caps key to produce katakana when turned on in かな mode. Also, many common katakana words can be typed in hiragana and then converted by pressing the spacebar. So really, you only need to explicitly switch into katakana input to type things that the software won’t convert for you.

You may be able to touch-type English but you probably can’t touch-type kana. The good news is that there are sites out there that give lessons in how to type Japanese using kana input. The one I’ve been using is here. But, as you might expect, such lessons are given in Japanese. You might be able to get by just looking at some pictures and trying the exercises but if you need a bit more hand-holding, you might want to try kana input when you can read enough Japanese to learn about it. (If you know of a kana input tutorial in English, please let us know!)

So, those are the basics of how to type Japanese into a computer. If you’re interested in having a Japanese layout keyboard, JBox/JList sells them or if you want an official Apple one like I have, you can actually get it from the US Apple Store. Just go to the product page for the keyboard and then select the Japanese version of it from the drop-down menu.

How do you usually input Japanese on your computer? Send an e-mail to us@thejapaneselearner.com or share with us on Google+ and Facebook.

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/06/22/writing-in-japanese-on-your-computer/feed/153http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/06/22/writing-in-japanese-on-your-computer/Spring 2012 Anime Review: Lupin the Third, Fujiko Minehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/uIXK95LZ8Zg/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/06/01/spring-2012-anime-review-lupin-the-third-fujiko-mine/#respondFri, 01 Jun 2012 21:00:40 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=697This is the fourth and last post in our four-part mini-series about anime airing this season in Japan. Check out last week’s post about Kids on the Slope.

Lupin III is a name that I think many old-time anime fans will be familiar with. The Japanese spin-off of Maurice LeBlanc’s master thief, Arsène Lupin, has been a household name in anime and manga since the 70’s. But this mini-series is about modern TV anime, right? What’s the old-timer doing here? Well, it turns out that one of the special productions being released to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Lupin III animated series is a new series called Lupin the Third, Fujiko Mine (Lupin III – 峰不二子という女).

For those who have never heard of him, Lupin III is descended from the world famous gentleman thief, Arsène Lupin. Like his grandfather, he’s incredibly clever and resourceful and obtains what he sets out to steal almost without fail. He even keeps with the tradition of sending out calling cards to warn the authorities of his targets. But no matter what they try, Interpol just can’t seem to catch him. The manga and animated series follows the capers of Lupin III and his crew as they try to steal the most valuable and rare treasures in the world and more often than not end up in way more trouble than they could ever have imagined.

Lupin is joined by Daisuke Jigen, the tough-as-nails hired gun turned thief. Jigen’s aim with his trusty revolver is impeccable and he always seem to have that one last bullet just when he needs it. The two are sometimes joined by Goemon Ishikawa XIII, a very stereotypical samurai who is constantly reflecting on his warrior spirit and says few words. His sword can cut through just about anything, but Goemon is very picky with his strikes and often remarks about how he has cut “yet another worthless thing.”

And then there’s Fujiko Mine. Her relationship with Lupin and his crew is… complicated. Lupin adores her and she’s sometimes genuinely attracted to him and inclined to help him out of a jam, but repeated experience has taught him that she can rarely be trusted. One minute, she’s practically jumping his bones and the next minute she’s saying goodbye as she dashes away with his mark! But she is largely a side character throughout Lupin’s adventures; sometimes she shows up and causes trouble (or gets him out of it) and sometimes she’s off doing something else. So, in a sort of departure from many of Lupin’s animated adventures, Fujiko is the star of this show and Lupin is the troublesome (and sometimes convenient!) side character who shows up in her stories.

I will say this right off the bat: for me, this show wins on the nostalgia factor alone. I was incredibly thrilled at the announcement of this series and I couldn’t wait for it to start airing. To quantify my love of things Lupin, Castle of Cagliostro, the Lupin III movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) is my favorite anime film of all time. Yes, out of everything. Ever. There are some excellent films out there, many of them also directed by Hayao Miyazaki, so I do not state this lightly. Lupin III balances quirky fun with bits of morals and a lot of heart. It is at once entertaining and thought-provoking and, in my humble opinion, the older works have definitely stood the test of time. The new TV series carries much of the same flavor, despite shifting the focus away from Lupin III himself.

But putting aside the nostalgia factor, if I had to sum this series up in a few words I would say that it is very much an art piece. The animation style for this new series feels like what would happen if you directly colored in the panels of the manga and made a flip-book out of them. At times it is quite mesmerizing and contributes to the darker air that this series has, in stark contrast to Lupin’s previous animated adventures which are more often bright and cheerful. But that said, the new work manages to keep to its roots and bring out some laughs.

I do have some small issues with the series, though. I find it is often very focused on Fujiko’s sex appeal, which for her brief appearances in previous animated stories adds to the humor but is so pronounced in this new series that it feels outright sexist. That’s the case even if you put aside how much her naked bosom features in the opening credits. There’s even depictions of a sexual relationship between Fujiko and Lupin’s long-time nemesis from Interpol, Inspector Zenigata, though one could argue that it’s pretty difficult to tell who is using who (and admittedly, it adds considerable depth to Zenigata’s character). I don’t recall this being featured very heavily in the manga but I haven’t read enough of it to say for certain. But in short, there’s a very heavy focus on Fujiko leveraging her sex appeal to get what she wants, or being pursued and used almost entirely for her sex appeal, and that might rub some audiences the wrong way. At the same time it is, for better or worse, an essential aspect of her character and this series is all about her, after all.

So, if you’re a long-time lover of Lupin III or you’d like to watch something that is sometimes funny, sometimes thought-provoking, and told in incredibly beautiful animation, Lupid the Third, Fujiko Mine should definitely be on your watch list. It is being simulcast by Funimation at 12:30 PM EST every Friday afternoon.

What are you watching this season? Comment here, on Google+, or on Facebook, or send an e-mail to us@thejapaneselearner.com.

This is the third post in our mini-series about the anime series currently being broadcast in Japan

Last week, I wrote about the incredibly odd high school love story, Mysterious Girlfriend X. If you were hoping for something with a bit more drama and a bit less drool, or if you really love jazz music, this week I’m writing about Kids on the Slope (坂道のアポロン).

Like Hyouka, I consider Kids on the Slope to be one of the season’s most promising shows, but for a slightly different reason: the distinguishing feature of this series is the jazz standards that help to tell the story, played in live sessions produced by none other than Yoko Kanno. Yes, that Yoko Kanno, the one who has brought us the incredibly memorable themes of Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Wolf’s Rain, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and Genesis of Aquarion, among many others. If you haven’t heard Yoko Kanno’s work, I highly recommend it. In my humble opinion, she stands among the greatest anime composers of all time and is easily one of the most versatile.

But, well, if you just want to listen to Yoko Kanno’s music, there are plenty of CDs out there. For Kids on the Slope to be really promising, it has to have more than just good music. What really gives this series its edge is the way that beautiful music combines with good characterization and a deceptively simplem, if standard, romantic plot to create something even greater.

Kaoru Nishimi is a very smart boy from Tokyo who is also a skilled piano player, classically trained. When he moves to Kyushu during the summer of his freshman year of high school, he feels incredibly unsettled, even to the point of feeling nauseous. It doesn’t help that his father is away, leaving the boy to his often mean and selfish aunt. He ends up seated beside Sentaro Kawabuchi, a wild and burly student who has a reputation for being dangerous and picking fights just to blow off steam. He also makes friends with Ritsuko Mukae, who is an old friend of Sentaro’s and their class’ representative.

Kaoru falls for Ritsuko almost at first sight and in trying to get close to her, he also learns that there’s much more to Sentaro than what others see on the surface. In particular, he has a deep passion for jazz drumming. Kaoru gets his first taste of it when Ritsuko brings him to her father’s record store. In the basement, there’s a piano and drum set, where Sentaro is already drumming out some swing beats. There’s a particular piano intro to a jazz standard that Sentaro knows how to play but when Kaoru steps in to finish it for him, it’s blatantly obvious that even though he knows the notes, he has no feel for jazz.

The (over-)confident pianist takes it as a challenge and buys the record, spending hours getting the “swing” just right. Finally, in a session with Sentaro on drums, Ritsuko’s father on bass, and Junichi Katsuragi (or as Sentaro calls him, Brother Jun) on trumpet, Kaoru hits his stride and joins right in, impressing the others with the feeling he puts into the keys. From there, the friendship between Sentaro, Kaoru, and Ritsuko blossoms, and the whole story revolves around the relationships between and around them as they fall in love, get into fights, and express their sometimes complicated feelings with beautiful jazz music.

If you usually don’t like girls’ manga and anime very much, you probably won’t like Kids on the Slope either, unless the music totally sells it for you. The plot and characterization is well-executed but in my view pretty par for the course. A love triangle grows more and more sides as misunderstandings accumulate and characters are defined as much by their shining moments as they are by their sadness and anger. It’s heart-wrenching to watch at times but also has very sweet moments.

So there’s one more show you might want to pick up this season. This one is also in Crunchyroll’s simulcast lineup; you can catch new episodes on Thursdays at 9:30AM Pacific. If you’re at FanimeCon 2012 in San Jose this weekend, there’s a distinct but very small chance you might stumble into me somewhere in the throngs of NorCal anime fans. Next week, I’ll be wrapping up the mini series with one more excellent anime from the Spring 2012 season and then moving on to something completely different.

What are you watching this season? Comment here, on Google+, or on Facebook, or send an e-mail to us@thejapaneselearner.com.

This is the second post in our mini-series about the anime series currently being broadcast in Japan.

Last week I wrote about Hyouka, a slice-of-life mystery series from the same studio that worked on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Staying with the high school theme, this week I’ll be writing about Mysterious Girlfriend X (謎の彼女X). But before I jump into it, a couple of words of warning: if you’re the sort who gets queasy around bodily fluids, this might not be your show. But, if you like the romance plot, you might be able to get by just by averting your eyes every so often. ;)

If you’re still reading, here’s a brief synopsis: Akira Tsubaki is an ordinary 17-year-old boy who is naturally curious about girls. His curiosity reaches its peak when Mikoto Urabe transfers into his class. Her hair mostly covers her eyes, she speaks with a bit of a flat effect, and she has some of the oddest habits. She spends lunch napping at her desk, she rejects all of the other girls’ attempts to socialize with her, and she bursts out laughing in the middle of class for reasons she won’t explain.

One day, while picking up his bag from class after a long day of school, he finds her napping at her desk once again. After he wakes her up and suggests she heads home, he notices a pool of her drool that was left on the desk. His curiosity gets the better of him and for reasons unknown to him, he decides to taste it. It’s a lot sweeter than he would have expected, but he comes to regret his decision later: he is gripped by a cold that just won’t go away.

Mikoto comes to visit Akira while he’s bed-ridden and reveals to him that his sickness isn’t a mere cold, but the result of withdrawal. From what? From her drool. It turns out that what has gripped him is “love sickness” of a kind and being without Mikoto’s drool for so many days has taken its toll on his body. Akira is flabbergasted (and who can blame him?) but Mikoto offers him a bit more of her drool and when he drinks that, he immediately makes a full recovery. This is the beginning of their incredibly odd relationship, centered around the “bond of drool” that they share.

This is, in my view, one of the wildcard shows of the season. Depending on who you ask, it’s either really good or way too weird. But what draws me into this series is that from the character designs to the animation style to the opening and closing sequences, Mysterious Girlfriend X feels very much like a 90’s anime. Being a fan of many shows from the 90’s, I can’t deny that the feeling of nostalgia has a strong pull on me. But also, once you look past the rather odd way in which Akira and Mikoto communicate with each other, their romance is adorable. If you subtract the “drool” from the equation, what you’re left with is a shy young man who knows little of women but really wants to experience more and a girl who is honest about her own feelings but can’t adequately express them to others. It’s a standard “boy meets girl” story turned on its head and given a “mysterious” twist.

I’ve been reading the manga series too and the anime series follows it pretty closely. Where the anime storytelling diverges from the manga, it is often to combine elements from a couple of manga chapters into one animated episode to give those elements greater effect. I’m also impressed with the quality, which while not as stunning as Hyouka, manages to be consistently great throughout. Also, if you’ve ever been annoyed at cutesy sounding “moe” characters, Mikoto is very much not that, though she has her moments of being absolutely adorable. The anime series seems to be a faithful adaptation that also offers its own improvements and I think it is a must-watch for fans of the manga.

So, if you can stomach a bit of drool (or at least manage to look away at the right times), and you like romantic comedy, Mysterious Girlfriend X might be the best series you pick up this season. Conveniently, Mysterious Girlfriend X is in Crunchyroll’s simulcast lineup, so you can catch a new episode every Sunday at 9:30AM Pacific.

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/05/20/spring-2012-anime-review-mysterious-girlfriend-x/feed/2http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/05/20/spring-2012-anime-review-mysterious-girlfriend-x/Spring 2012 Anime Review: Hyouka (氷菓)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/1bX9-BeOgxE/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/05/11/spring-2012-anime-review-hyouka-%e6%b0%b7%e8%8f%93/#commentsFri, 11 May 2012 21:00:34 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=668Spring 2012 has been, in my humble opinion, an excellent season for anime. It wasn’t too long ago that I’d lost faith as an anime fan because the quality of the shows being broadcast just wasn’t as great as it used to be. If I was lucky, I could find maybe one or two shows that I would want to follow during a season. But in Spring 2012, I have found as many as six series that I really like.

So, I’m running a mini-series of posts on The Japanese Learner about my favorite shows of the season. I hope that these will help you find more anime to watch. Immersion is one of the most important aspects of Japanese learning and it’s also so much easier to study when you can enjoy the material, too.

This week I’m writing about Hyouka (氷菓), a slice-of-life mystery series surrounding a high school’s classic literature club.

Houtarou Oreki is a young boy who lives by a single motto: don’t do anything you don’t need to and rush though the things you must do. It’s odd, then, that an “energy conserver” like Houtarou should find himself at a school renowned for its wide variety of extracurricular activities. At his older sister’s behest, he fills out an application to join a club, even though it is against his nature. According to the letter she sent him from India, the Classic Literature club has no members and is facing closure if it doesn’t add new heads soon.

Being the only one in the club, he figures he can at least enjoy having a club room all to himself. He borrows the key from the faculty office and then heads over to let himself into the room… and there’s a girl, looking out the window. This is odd, since the door was definitely locked when he got to the room, but those thoughts wash completely away when their eyes meet. She has beautiful eyes and an intense gaze that penetrates right to his soul.

She’s Eru Chitanda, and she has joined the club for her own personal reasons. But, more importantly, she’s puzzled that the door was locked when Houtarou walked in, because it was unlocked when she walked in and he has the only key. She absolutely must know the answer to this riddle and she insists that Houtarou help her figure it out.

With his incredible skills of deduction, Houtarou needs few clues to piece the whole story together and Eru is very impressed. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t end there. Her curiosity about nearly everything is absolutely insatiable and when she looks into his eyes and tells him “I’m curious,” he just can’t seem to say no. And this is how Houtarou finds himself, his best friend Satoshi, and Eru solving a series of mysteries surrounding the Classic Literature club.

What makes Hyouka stand out for me is that it is visually stunning. Kyoto Animation, who you may remember as the studio that worked on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, has outdone themselves here. The visual quality of Hyouka’s animation is top notch. When Eru’s passion is ignited, her eyes shine like precious stones, really driving home the incredible impression that she makes on Houtarou with her gaze. And when Eru walks up to Houtarou for the first time, takes his hand, and insists that she’s curious, we see her hair grow out to ridiculous length and wrap around him, pulling him uncomfortably close to her as she stares deep into his soul. The execution is fantastic and in my view really helps the audience to identify with Houtarou, who just wants to live his life in peace but can’t bring himself to refuse Eru’s earnest pleas for his help. In a way, he’s similar to Kyon, and KyoAni’s experience in depicting this kind of character definitely shows.

As of this writing, three episodes have aired, but this is already one of the most promising shows of the season. However, it also has some very strong competitors.

If you like school stories and you like mystery, give Hyouka a try. And tune in next week for a write-up of another excellent Spring 2012 anime series!

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/05/11/spring-2012-anime-review-hyouka-%e6%b0%b7%e8%8f%93/feed/20http://thejapaneselearner.com/japanese-culture/2012/05/11/spring-2012-anime-review-hyouka-%e6%b0%b7%e8%8f%93/From The Trenches: More Than One Month into Heisighttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/mcYWAEH9yaY/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/05/04/from-the-trenches-more-than-one-month-into-heisig/#respondFri, 04 May 2012 21:00:44 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=661A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a review of Remembering the Kanji: Volume 1 by Dr. James Heisig. At that time, I had gotten only a bit over 200 characters into the book. Now, I’ve reached almost 700 characters, which is getting to the boundary of the number of characters I used to know how to write when I was taking Japanese classes in university. This week, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned from applying Heisig’s method over a longer period of time. You may have seen bits and pieces of this if you follow myself and/or The Japanese Learner on Google+ (which sometimes gets cross-posted to Facebook), but in this post I’m going to stitch it all together and flesh it out some more.

Here’s where I stand right now:

Number of characters studied: 695

Lessons completed: 23/56

Number of reviews per day: roughly 30-40 characters, up to 20 of which are new cards.

Time spent reviewing per day: 30 minutes on average

Number of characters scheduled for review in one month or longer: 165 (and many more cards scheduled for review in 20-30 days)

Percentage of mature cards answered with ease 4: ~80%

Percentage of young cards answered with ease 4: ~50%

I missed a few days when I was travelling for business last weekend, but otherwise I’ve been doing reviews with Anki every day. While writing notes from the first lessons of the book and ripping out pages to use for practicing and reviewing, I’ve consumed almost an entire small notebook. Adding it all up, I’ve made a significant amount of progress up to this point. I feel a bit proud. As you can see from the last two stats, my retention of the material is pretty decent too.

But okay, enough bragging. Here’s how I currently study the lessons:

For each lesson, I consider the primitive elements that make it up and come up with a story, which I enter into Reviewing the Kanji. While thinking about that story, I write the character down in my notebook, trying to anchor the story to the character (including relative position of elements) in my memory. When I have difficulty coming up with a story, I look through some of the top stories and might either copy or adapt one of them for my own use.

All reviews are by Anki. I don’t currently sync to a mobile device, though I’ve considered it. I have my session limit set to 30 minutes and the new cards limit set to 20, which I’ve found to be a pretty good number even though some lessons are longer than others. The deck I’m using is a shared deck (File > Download > Shared Deck…). On the front is the keyword, which is a link to that character on Reviewing the Kanji, and on the back is the character as well as some other metadata (frame no., number of strokes).

I review every day and I try to set aside time to study each day as well, but that sometimes doesn’t work out since studying the characters takes much longer than the 30 minute session limit on my reviews. By default, Anki has four ease levels (four buttons that show up when you click the button to show the answer for your card). This is how I use them:

Ease 1: I could not produce the character (I gave up on recalling it) or I produced it incorrectly. I am incredibly mean to myself on this one. Even a single stroke off and I mark it 1, no matter how mature the card was. This is important because sometimes characters differ by very little and you need to train your mind to sweat those very small differences.

Ease 2: I struggled quite a bit but I was eventually able to produce the character correctly. I usually mark a card as ease 2 if I had to play and replay the story to recall the elements and write the character and this took me about a minute or longer.

Ease 3: I was able to produce the character correctly but it took a bit of time to recall it.

Ease 4: I produced the correct character (almost) instantly.

Here are some of the observations I’ve made as I’ve stumbled along:

Before, forgetting a character was pretty much the end. Only by miracle might I be able to recall the sequence of strokes to write it again. But since starting to study via the Heisig method, I have surprised myself quite a few times by recalling how to write a character when, at first, my mind drew a complete blank. The story plays out in my head and the elements pop out, which triggers my visual memory to write them in the correct places relative to each other.

As characters “mature” in my reviews, I use the story less and less. Sometimes all I need is to recall the plot (skeleton of the story which includes the elements). Sometimes, I don’t even need that and I just start writing the correct character almost immediately (I mark those as ease 4 when I answer them).

Leaning too much on the stories that other students share on Reviewing the Kanji has hampered my study a bit. Apart from the stories that Heisig supplies in the early lessons, I tend to remember stories I come up with more strongly than stories I copy from others. My current fix for this problem is to switch to the kanji on the website and then look at the book, read the block of text (including elements and hints/tips) and close my eyes immediately afterward to form the story.

Effort spent on coming up with a good story has definitely translated into a much more solid grip on the character. While Anki makes it very easy to do reviews, spacing repeats days and then weeks apart until you finally master the cards, spending a couple of minutes or more on each character to form a strong story can save you from repeating the same characters a lot.

My strongest stories are outright absurd and a few are even offensive (I won’t share any here, but check Reviewing the Kanji and you can find quite a few). I think this means that something way out there tends to make a much more lasting impression on my memory.

As I wrote before, this method gives absolutely no treatment of how to write characters neatly. I am currently looking at resources for learning to write characters more neatly and if I find something I like I’ll definitely be posting about it.

Even though I can’t use it well, a brush pen (like this) makes reviews a bit more fun, though I spend longer on each character when I use it.

I hope this has been really informative to all of you who are also studying from the Remembering the Kanji series books. If you’ve got any questions or would like to share some tips of your own, e-mail us@thejapaneselearner.com or share it on Google+ with the tags #heisig and #rtk (or #rtk1 through #rtk3 if you want to be specific).

There are many good Japanese dictionaries (and similar) online — I personally recommend jisho.org, which I’ve started using over WWWJDIC because I find the interface is much nicer. But you can’t always have your computer with you, so if you’re studying on the go or you’re taking Japanese courses in a classroom setting, you need something you can use as a reference when you need to know what a word means or need help with translation.

A paper dictionary is always a solution. Entry-level dictionaries are fairly easy to find in print, published by names you’re familiar with from English dictionaries like Random House and Webster. At the beginner level, I personally recommend Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary (not an affiliate link!) because it’s good to start working with hiragana and katakana as soon as you can and the ordering of the entries will get you used to the way that Japanese words are ordered phonetically. But you’ll soon find that unlike, say, French or Spanish, you can’t get by with just a dictionary for translating words between languages, no matter how large it is. You’ll soon need a kanji dictionary, a dictionary particularly for looking up kanji characters, which will help you to read/write unfamiliar words. And for more advanced reading, there’s nothing quite like a straight Japanese dictionary, which gives definitions of Japanese words in Japanese.

As you progress, those books will become bigger and more numerous until it just isn’t practical to carry them with you anymore. It is at precisely that point that you should consider an electronic dictionary. Electronic dictionaries, or 電子辞書, have a number of key advantages over paper dictionaries:

They are portable. A copy of 広辞苑 (one of the more popular dictionaries in print in Japan), is quite a thick volume. Those ~240,000 entries can fit in the palm of your hand with an electronic dictionary.

They tend to contain multiple volumes. The one I have contains 広辞苑 along with 明鏡 (another Japanese dictionary), a kanji dictionary, two encyclopedias, J-E and E-J dictionaries, and more.

They serve specialized needs well. You can probably find an electronic dictionary loaded with specialized content for your particular field, including science, computing, and medicine.

They tend to have features for easy lookup. For example, many models have a touch panel to allow you to look up entries by hand writing. With multiple volumes, good models provide a “jump” feature to allow you to jump from one entry to another, or even between volumes!

But there are also a few disadvantages:

They are usually quite expensive. I paid around $300 for mine when I bought it a couple of years ago.

They’re quite hard to get outside of Japan. Then again, so are many of the best Japanese dictionaries in print (though even those aren’t too difficult to obtain if you’re lucky enough to have a Japanese bookstore nearby, like Kinokuniya).

They aren’t typically designed for foreign learners of Japanese. But I wouldn’t recommend buying an electronic dictionary unless you’ve gotten to at least an intermediate or pre-advanced proficiency in Japanese, so this is probably less of an issue than the two points above.

So maybe after reading all of that, you’ve decided to buy an electronic dictionary. What do you need to look for, you ask? Well, it turns out that somebody on the Japan subreddit posted a pretty thorough guide to electronic dictionaries. To summarize it very briefly, you want to find something that comes with dictionaries and reference books that you need and will actually use and you will probably want to aim for models that cost $300 or more (cheaper ones will tend to be outclassed by other portable dictionary options like smartphone apps, which we will cover in more detail in future posts).

Twin touch panel: the lower touch panel can be used to look up entries by hand writing but the main display is also touchable. You can use the stylus to click on entries while browsing, or in combination with the jump function to select which word you want to jump from, among other things.

Backlight: because sometimes the lighting isn’t the best when I’m using my electronic dictionary. The backlight is just about perfect for reading the LCD display, providing just enough light to clearly read it without overwhelming the eyes.

Specialized volumes: in particular, there are some books on medicine and computing.

This all said, when my study of Japanese was slipping more, I got much less use out of my electronic dictionary, and looking at it now I think I could have done a bit more research to pick an even better model for my needs. There are quite a few parts of it that I have absolutely no use for at all. But since it, like many others, is designed with native Japanese speakers in mind, maybe that can’t be helped.

Do you have an electronic dictionary? Which model do you own? We’d love to see recommendations, especially since it has been a long time since I was in the market for an electronic dictionary. Leave a comment here or send an e-mail to enrico@thejapaneselearner.com!

]]>http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/04/19/electronic-dictionaries/feed/2http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/04/19/electronic-dictionaries/Book Review: Remembering the Kanji Volume 1http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJapaneseLearner/~3/S1aAXnH5nWs/
http://thejapaneselearner.com/learning-japanese/2012/04/13/book-review-remembering-the-kanji-volume-1/#respondFri, 13 Apr 2012 21:00:44 +0000http://thejapaneselearner.com/?p=636Our usual review disclaimer applies: The Japanese Learner links to the Amazon.com listing for this book but is not affiliated with Amazon. We don’t make a single penny if you click the link and buy the book. The Japanese Learner is also not affiliated with the publisher, University of Hawaii Press.

One thing that I’ve noticed slips quite quickly when I’m not studying Japanese everyday is kanji. It’s a pretty tall order to remember the 2000+ characters set out by Japan’s Ministry of Education as the 常用 (Common Use) kanji, which are said to appear in 99.9% of all written Japanese. But once you’ve mastered these characters and their combinations, you are well on your way to full literacy and fluency in Japanese. It makes sense for Japanese school children to learn them by rote in the grade order that they’re given by the Ministry, but for the adult learner that’s much less effective. For one thing, it takes quite a lot more time than we’d like to spend. However, open just about any kanji textbook and the exact same techniques are in play: character, readings, compounds, drill, drill, drill.

James Heisig, author of the 3-part series “Remembering the Kanji,” has a different idea, and it is one that seems to have quite a following in the Japanese learning community. So, I grabbed a copy of the first book and started to work through it. At this point, I’ve read and studied the first 10 lessons out of 56. Out of the 2042 characters presented in the book, I have studied 234. I have been reviewing the characters using a publicly-shared Anki deck that has the kanji’s keyword on one side and the character itself on the other.

The basic theory behind Heisig’s course on how not to forget kanji characters and what they mean is simple; Chinese students of Japanese, having thoroughly studied their native writing system, have a distinct advantage over students of Japanese whose first language doesn’t involve Chinese characters. While there are some minor differences (Japan has effectively “forked” the Chinese writing system), Chinese natives basically know what the kanji mean and how to write them, just not how to pronounce them and not the particulars of how they combine. Traditional approaches to teaching kanji to speakers of other languages involve presenting the characters in some logical order (e.g. frequency of use, Japanese grade level) along with readings and sample compounds. These approaches thus mix learning how to write kanji characters with learning their core meaning, how they are pronounced, and how they combine together to form other Japanese words. The result can feel like drinking from a firehose. Heisig cuts away a lot of that and asks the reader to focus on one thing: associating the written character with its core meaning. And the way he proposes to do this is by engaging the “imaginative memory” to give students a tool for recalling a kanji character given its keyword.

So how does this “imaginative memory” work? Parts that appear in many kanji characters (not necessarily radicals) become primitive elements. Whole characters may also become primitive elements and sometimes the meaning of the primitive element is only loosely related to the character. Sometimes, it isn’t even related at all. For example, 里, the kanji for the Japanese unit of distance “ri,” becomes a “computer” when used as a primitive element. The primitive elements that make up a kanji are worked into a story and that story, once internalized, can be used to recall the kanji character given its keyword. As a brief example, I introduced 里 as computer, and can use that to create a story that helps me to remember 埋. On the left we have soil (土), so imagine burying a computer that has now become obsolete in the soil. If you can recall that image when you see the word bury, you can use it to produce the character. This process of building up full characters from primitive elements only loosely follows and sometimes steers completely away from the actual etymology of characters and the actual radicals that form them.

It sounds completely silly at times. Strange (奇) becomes the image of an article in a “Strange but True” column about a St. Bernard (大) who hit the brandy keg around its neck a bit too hard and, as a result, has had its mouth (口) nailed (丁) shut. I mean, in the first place, isn’t that kind of cruel to the dog? But these stories are meant to tickle the imagination and having put it into use for a while, it is surprisingly effective. Before, when I couldn’t forgot a character, I almost always had no hope of recalling it from my memory. There was no tool that I could use to bring it back, it was just gone. Since it was only ever a series of strokes, that’s to be expected. But while reviewing the kanji via my Anki deck, I have surprised myself several times by being able to dig a character out of my memory by using the story. As Tofugu writes in their 30-day eBook, being able to recall something after you’ve forgotten it is much better than trying to power through on rote memory alone, with absolutely no backup for when that fails you.

The book is also very good about providing some advice on how to follow the method and even some remedies for when things seem to be going horribly wrong. Lesson 11, in particular, only introduces 15 new characters but includes a thorough treatment of the common problems one might have in following the method. If you’re a stickler for classic pen/marker and paper flash cards, Heisig even has some advice for you there, too.

There are some drawbacks to Heisig’s method. Firstly, the method is fundamentally incompatible with just about any other traditional method of studying kanji. Heisig warns that you will very likely have trouble combining this with a traditional Japanese textbook and course. Another downside is that for all of the study of kanji characters and their meanings, you won’t learn to read and write any words. This method is not for building vocabulary; it is purely for remembering the kanji and its core meaning. Heisig argues that once you’ve learned to associate the kanji with its meaning, learning the readings and compounds comes easily enough. I’m actually fine with this, since even before Heisig’s book I could recognize many characters and even know what they mean, but didn’t know how to read them. It is possible to separate these aspects of kanji from each other and there are even benefits to doing so. Even if you don’t know how to read kanji compounds, you can often guess at their meaning by looking at the individual kanji, so a method for memorizing that for all of the characters in common use will certainly be valuable in vocabulary acquisition. Another thing that is missing from the book is help with handwriting. Other kanji textbooks in my collection include some tips on how to render characters neatly and even include the common handwritten version alongside the print and/or brush version, but Heisig’s book doesn’t. If you need a little help learning to write characters neatly, you might need another book.

So, it’s a bit of a leap of faith, but having taken the time to really try it, I can honestly say that I feel like it is working. And really, that’s the most important thing. Sure, the method is unconventional and even silly at times, but if it works for you, this book may be the most valuable addition to your Japanese learning bookshelf. If you’re not enthused about putting down your money to own this without getting to try the method, you might want to try borrowing a copy. Alternatively, you can try poking around this website, which acts as a sort of complement to the book, allowing you to record your own stories for kanji and exchange them with others. You can study the kanji through that site too, though you will definitely want to make sure you’re actually putting pen to paper as you’re working your way through the lessons. If you’re using the same publicly-shared Anki deck that I’m using, the keyword is actually a hyperlink to that same website.

While I did say that this book doesn’t cover readings and compounds, the next book in the series does try to provide a system for memorizing the readings of kanji characters. When I get there, I’ll be sure to write another review. For now, I’m pretty happy with my progress in learning the meaning and writing of kanji characters. =)